Symphony

Built for teams that work in finance, chat app Symphony can securely connect both your coworkers and people in other organizations, but it's expensive and confusing to learn.

By Jill Duffy

7 Mar 2018, 8:31 p.m.

If you're familiar with team messaging apps, you should have no problem wrapping your head around Symphony. It connects colleagues both in real time and asynchronously on a multimedia communication platform. You can text chat, swap messages, have a video call, and so forth. Where Symphony differs from other team messaging apps is that it's built specifically for the financial industry and allows you to chat with people at different organizations (the latter of which Slack has recently starting doing, too). Symphony acts more like email than most other chat apps and therefore replicates many of the same problems of email. Additionally, it's messy and confusing to learn, in part because it bucks common terminology. It's also unreasonably expensive compared with other options, even Editors' Choice Slack, which is already expensive.

Price and Plans

Symphony offers three tiers of service: Essential (free), Business ($240 per person per year), and Enterprise (custom prices).

The Essential service offers all the same in-app features as the paid plans, but you have to run it in a web browser or use the mobile apps, as you don't get desktop apps with the free plan. Essential plans do not include any backend compliance or administrative features, so it would be nearly impossible for a financial company to use this tier of service to actually help run its business.

The paid plans require an annual contract, so while the Business account list price says $20 per person per month, what you pay is $240 per person per year. You can adjust the number of licenses at any time. The paid tiers of service include compliance and administration features, plus additional support, such as on-site installation and on-site training for Enterprise customers.

Symphony's price is significantly higher than any other team messaging app's, and about four times as much as the average. A company representative said the product is priced competitively with other enterprise collaboration tools. The same representative also elaborated on how Symphony's privacy and security differ differs from that of other team messaging apps. More on that in a moment.

While "collaboration app" is a rather broad term, and prices in that category have a very wide range, team messaging apps typically cost $3 to $6 per person per month. Atlassian Stride, Flock, and Zoho Cliq are on the low end of that scale, while Glip by RingCentral, Twist by Doist, and Microsoft Teams are on the higher end. (Microsoft Teams' rate includes other Microsoft apps, so you get even more for your money.)

Editors' Choice Slack charges $8 to $15 per person per month, which is higher than most others, but still not nearly as high as Symphony's rate.

Security

Because Symphony is designed to be used by organizations and individuals in the finance sector, it needs to have tight security. Symphony uses end-to-end encryption, rather than simply encrypting data only while it is in transit. Slack does not use end-to-end encryption, but Flock does and a few other team messaging apps, such as SecureChat and Brosix do also. Flock is a direct competitor, but Brosix is more like an old-school instant messaging app than a team messaging app.

My contact detailed how encryption works specifically in Symphony: "End-to-end encryption is commonly found in privacy-oriented secure messaging tools designed for individuals. However, the encryption in these tools also prevents companies from deploying them, because there is no way for the company to retain or monitor records across their own organization. This is particularly an issue for banks, which have specific regulatory rules they must follow around record retention and compliance surveillance for their staff. Symphony employs a different key management structure in its end-to-end encryption, where client organizations operate their own key management infrastructure at a company level—typically they use a device called a hardware security module, which is a specialized piece of cryptographic hardware (in a consumer privacy app the keys would be locked to individual phones). These devices allow the companies to have complete control of their encryption keys, facilitating record retention and compliance at a company level—while keeping the keys out of the cloud infrastructure where they might be hacked."

The point is that the company using the tool has some agency over its own security measures and can retain records, ensure compliance, and so forth.

Symphony Setup

Symphony requires two-factor authentication by phone to establish an account and for all future sign-ins. The web app works in Chrome or Internet Explorer, and the desktop app is for Windows only. Symphony has an iOS and Android app as well.

I've used or tested half a dozen or more team messaging apps in my day, and usually, I get the lay of the land pretty quickly. They all tend to have a similar layout, structure, and method for helping you get started.

Symphony looks at first glance like it's going to be the same. A left rail holds a list of channels you join and your private chats. The main window of the app shows the stream of the currently selected channel or chat. A few menu items appear across the top. But nothing functioned as I expected it to. I managed to invite some colleagues to join me in Symphony, but I couldn't figure out how to create an open channel that they could see and optionally join. I had heard that Symphony had something called "mega chat rooms," which I understood to be public chat rooms, but I couldn't find those either. With no dummy content in the app to orient me and no tutorial videos either, I finally waved a white flag and arranged for a private demo.

Getting Started

A representative from the company walked me through Symphony's basic features in a webinar type conference call. As he explained some of the features and helped bring Symphony into focus for me, time and again I said to myself, "Oh! They're using the wrong name for that. That's why I'm so confused."

For example, pretty much every conversation is called a "chat." If it's a one-on-one private message, it's a chat. If you have a large group of people talking among themselves, it's still a chat. Words like channel and room don't exist here.

The mega chat rooms, I learned, are nothing more than chats with more than 15,000 people in them. While I imagined them as being akin to an internet forum, they are in fact usually nothing more than broadcast channels for large organizations. You say tomato, I say broadcast channel.

I was equally unclear whether one could invite guest users to one's Symphony account. Typically, a guest user is a contractor, freelancer, or other partner who needs to collaborate with your team, but who also must be restricted from certain conversations or features (for example, you might not want your guests to be able to make their own channels).

As the Symphony rep struggled to understand my question, I realized we were once more at a language impasse. I rephrased the question, and this time in answering, the rep started down a path I didn't expect, going on about an in-app directory and certified checkmarks. In Symphony, you can have a conversation with anyone who has an account, regardless of whether that person works for the same company as you. When you start a new chat, you can invite anyone with a Symphony account to join. So if you want to connect with a contractor, just tell her to sign up for Symphony, and then add her to whatever chats you want.

Honestly, it's surprising. Imagine if in Gmail, you were able to search all of Gmail for anyone's email address by first or last name. I can't imagine how often people with common names get invited to join obscure chats by mistake. Apparently, you can opt out of the public directory. It sure would have been nice to have this information presented to me when I first signed up.

Within the directory, there's a system of certification, similar to the blue verification check mark in Twitter (and doesn't that work like a peach...). You can verify yourself in Symphony by connecting to your LinkedIn account. If you say you work for Company X in both LinkedIn and Symphony, you're on the short path to becoming bona fide.

Symphony does have some neat aspects, like the fact that the main window can hold multiple panels. In other words, you can view more than one chat at a time and rearrange the interface as you like. Zoho Cliq also uses a configurable multi-paneled interface, although it sticks to just columns whereas in Symphony there's a little more flexibility.

Additional Features

Let me circle back to Symphony's stated purpose of being a new method of communication among people in finance, not only within their own organization, but also outside it. To that end, any chat you have that includes even one external person is marked as such, the idea being you'll want to be careful what you say to whom.

The more I thought out this inter-organizational connectivity during the demo, the more I saw Symphony as being way too similar to email. So I asked, "How is it fundamentally different from email?"

I found the answer—"it looks like chat, and it captures things differently"—disappointing. Sure, there are inherent benefits in the form factor of team messaging apps. For starters, they encourage brevity by design, which email does not do. They also enable more general and ongoing conversations, whereas the subject line function in email nudges people toward having an on-topic conversation until it reaches a conclusion. They may also be more easily searchable than email. Still, if all you have are chats and no channels, how is it different from email message threads?

I'm not blind to some of the other differences between team messaging and email, of course. I get that hashtags or keyword alerts help clue people into conversations in a way that email can't. Symphony doubles down on hashtags by including support for cashtags as well. Cashtags are hashtags; you interact with them in exactly the same way. The difference is that cashtags use a dollar sign instead of a pound at the start, and you specifically use them with stock symbols. For example, if you want to talk about IBM's financials, you would include $IBM in your post, not to be confused with #IBM when discussing the company more generally.

In Symphony, you can create alerts for when hashtags and cashtags are used in chats in which you are a member. These alerts are called signals—not "alerts" and not "notifications," but signals.

Diving Deeper

Just as Symphony's particular language was starting to sink in, I navigated to a view that I thought was going to show my preferences (by clicking on my name at the top left corner). Instead, I saw three tabs called Wall Posts, Rooms, and Signals. Rooms? The rooms that show up here are also listed as chats in the left rail. But not all chats are rooms. Why there aren't two separate sections in the left rail for rooms and chats is beyond me.

Also in this secret three-tabbed area, you learn that you have a wall on which you can write posts and that you can follow people and have followers, as you can on Twitter or Facebook.

Symphony offers integrations in a way I haven't seen in other team messaging apps. There's an apps marketplace built right into your account where you can find apps and add them to your interface. They're mostly designed to deliver news or information related to finance. For example, a Dow Jones app pulls in headlines and other news from Dow Jones News.

More standard integrations are supported, too, with apps such as Jira and GitHub that are customized to the services your organization uses and how they use them.

While Symphony doesn't support every app under the sun, it does work with Zapier, which is a third-party system that creates integrations and automations between apps that don't allow for them natively.

Need for Improvement

Symphony clearly has a lot to offer, especially in terms of security, but it needs refinement. It particularly needs to improve how it trains new users. Every person's account should offer dummy chats and tutorial videos explaining how the features work. Terminology should conform to industry standards so as not to confuse people who already speak the lingo. For now, stick with Editors' Choice Slack, no matter what industry you're in. If you have less of a need to communicate with people outside your organization, Glip by RingCentral is an excellent team chat platform, as is Flock.

Symphony

fair

at

Bottom Line: Built for teams that work in finance, chat app Symphony can securely connect both your coworkers and people in other organizations, but it's expensive and confusing to learn.

Pros

Cross-platform, multi-device protection. Good scores in hands-on tests. Includes firewall, file shredder, and many other bonus features.

Cons

Some so-so scores from independent labs. WebAdvisor's Site Report didn't work consistently in testing.